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Lowe’s / Snappy DIY

This story originally appeared on Contagious I/O, our intelligence tool featuring the most creative and effective ideas in marketing from around the world

Home improvement retailer breaks down DIY challenges on Snapchat

US retailer Lowe’s has created a Snapchat account to help users discover home improvement tips and tricks.

The In a Snap campaign, created with BBDO, New York, uses the platform to showcase a series of videos explaining easy spring cleaning and do-it-yourself projects. The videos appear under the brand’s Snapchat Story – a loop of clips that are available for a period of 24 hours.

Lowe’s tutorial-style snippets make use of the tapping action for skipping through Snapchat Stories – essentially turning the story into an interactive lesson. The videos ask users to tap a specific location on the screen to make it feel as though they are involved in the process.

For example, clicking on the head of a nail skips to the next video where you see the nail neatly drilled into the wall. Or tapping on a paintbrush cues the next video where the wall is painted. By tapping through each step in the story, users follow the step-by-step process of say, building a study nook, or changing a backsplash in the kitchen.

Contagious Insight /

DIY for everyone / This short format helps Lowe’s break complex tasks down into easily digestible steps, making daunting home improvement projects seem more approachable. By making DIY more accessible, Lowe’s reduces barriers to entry for home improvement projects and becomes relevant to more people – not everyone is going to feel confident taking on an entire kitchen renovation, but putting up a few shelves seems attainable.

Lowe’s and social / This isn’t the first time Lowe’s has entered the social space. In 2013, the brand launched Fix in Six, a Vine campaign which featured six-second looping videos each centred around a home improvement hack, and in 2014, the retailer documented DIY projects in super-fast hyperlapse speed on Instagram.

According to Lowe’s chief marketing officer, Marci Grebstein, speaking to the Wall Street Journal, both these campaigns helped boost social engagement for the brand. Snapchat, then, feels like a natural progression. And just like earlier social efforts, Lowe’s once again demonstrates a real knack for creating short-form content with a practical, useful application that ties back to the brand’s core offering while carefully considering the medium.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Grebstein said: ‘The challenge as a marketer today is, how do you continue to engage consumers differently and within different social platforms. We have to be able to create informative and entertaining content based on how the platform works.’

This story originally appeared on Contagious I/O, our intelligence tool featuring the most creative and effective ideas in marketing from around the world. I/O helps anyone in the world of marketing understand why brands are innovating, how they're doing it and with what success.